Smith has long engaged with the concept of misunderstanding — be it ideological, political, linguistic, or misun- derstanding that arises from subjective narration, filmic devices, and our relationship to the media that shape our view of the world. Smith’s latest video, Steve Hates Fish, is an exploration of manufactured misunderstanding. By deliberately confusing the popular ‘Word Lens’ translator app for smartphones, which translates text in real time using the phone’s camera, Smith recasts the shop signs in his local neighbourhood as a bazaar of dadaist plays-on-words. The jumpy, often useless jumble of words onscreen inspires a kind of empathy. Watching the app search its memory for a corresponding translation is somehow not far from the futility of trying to make heads or tails of signage in a country where one does not speak the language. (Patrick Armstrong)
